Charge Prediction by Constitutive Elements Matching of Crimes

Charge Prediction by Constitutive Elements Matching of Crimes

Jie Zhao, Ziyu Guan, Cai Xu, Wei Zhao, Enze Chen

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4517-4523. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/627

Charge prediction is to automatically predict the judgemental charges for legal cases. To convict a person/unit of a charge, the case description must contain matching instances of the constitutive elements (CEs) of that charge. This knowledge of CEs is a valuable guide for the judge in making final decisions. However, it is far from fully exploited for charge prediction in the literature. In this paper we propose a novel method named Constitutive Elements-guided Charge Prediction (CECP). CECP mimics human's charge identification process to extract potential instances of CEs and generate predictions accordingly. It avoids laborious labeling of matching instances of CEs by a novel reinforcement learning module which progressively selects potentially matching sentences for CEs and evaluates their relevance. The final prediction is generated based on the selected sentences and their relevant CEs. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the superiority of CECP over competitive baselines.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Applications
Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Natural Language Processing: Text Classification